Days were not over half so soon when we ate passion with a spoon.Swirled chocolate at the Frosty Freeze melting in the prairie breeze hot and redolent of soil— chaff of wheat and rattled coil. Summer days and summer nights, rolls in grass and water fights with uncoiled hoses, cooking pans, rolled up cuffs and soaked white Vans.

Passion then was not so much a thing of kissing or of touch as of smells and sights and taste. Baking beans and paper paste. Brand new tablets, pencil shavings. Summer nights, then autumn cravings. Cattle lowing, school bells, Cool spring water from deep wells. Throats that ached from drinking it, brought to light from ancient pit.

All these simple remembered things that thinking about passion brings: spin-overs on the monkey bars, rides on bikes and naming stars. It’s true some passion rides on night with pressing lips and gentle bite, or trembles on the fingertips straying over breasts or hips.

Yet simpler loves bring lesser rations of what adults consider passions. Words like passion must be allowed to be unfettered, like a cloud and not confined in connotation, dictionary or denotation. Sometimes passion can be bright— A meadowlark or soaring kite. Sun-chapped lips just touched with mist long before they’re ever kissed.

The car on the left was the one I requested. The car on the right was the one I got!!!!

When I was still trying to make it up to the Cabot trail in Nova Scotia in the black beast pictured above, I stopped at a big red barn restaurant—the only place close to the motel where I stayed for the night. The meal was not memorable and was accompanied by the agony of a girl child in the next booth who SCREAMED in a high shrill voice for at least half of the time to the accompaniment of a mother who occasionally ineffectively tried to shush her. It occurred to me that I could move, but at that point she started running up and down the length of the restaurant, piping “Ring around the rosy” in her irritatingly shrill and LOUD voice. Since I hesitated to turn to fix her with my own shaming glare, I never laid eyes on her until they finally left half way through my meal. By her behavior, I had thought she must be three or so, but was amazed to see when they finally left that she was more like five or six.

It was an incredible relief until another man came in with what looked like the same child. They blessedly sat a few booths beyond me as she seemed to possess the same voice and irritating behavior. At least, however, she stayed in her own booth—a bit further from my unappreciative ear than the last child. The meal was forgettable. The experience wasn’t. But, when I left, I at least snapped this photo which illustrates well the difference between the car I wanted and the gas-guzzling technologically puzzling beast that Hertz actually issued me. We parted company last night. Such a relief to hand it back to its rightful owners.